How Much Do The British Government Know About The Murder Of Pat Finucane?

In February 1989, Michael Finucane, then aged 17, witnessed one of the most notorious killings in Northern Ireland’s tragic recent history. Gunmen burst into his family home and shot his father, the defence lawyer Pat Finucane, 14 times. Though it would be understandable in the circumstances, anyone expecting Michael Finucane to be a jittery wreck in adulthood would be bitterly disappointed.

Now a Dublin based solicitor, Michael divides his time between the Four Courts (natch!), his new baby boy, a business venture, supporting Spurs and campaigning to discover the truth behind his dad’s murder.
The killing itself was brutal and horrific. But what made it worse was the growing realisation that agencies of the British state had conspired to allow it to happen. Just how deep was their involvement? And how widely did the collusion run? The Finucane family has been calling for a public enquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death for years. So far that call has fallen on deaf ears.
But the Finucanes are not about to shut up and go away.

The Finucane case has already been the subject of a comprehensive Panorama documentary ‘A License To Murder’, three inquiries by Sir John Stevens, and a call by the UN in 1998 for a full independent investigation of the matter. The most recent inquiry into the matter, conducted by retired Canadian Supreme Court Judge, Peter Cory, yet again found evidence of collusion by members of the RUC, the Special Branch and MI5 in Pat Finucane’s murder. Cory stated that M15, the British Army and the RUC had all separately been told by agents that loyalists were targeting Pat Finucane, yet failed to take action lest intervention compromise the security of their informers. And yet a full public inquiry is not forthcoming.
Since the publication of Judge Cory’s preliminary reports last April, the British Government has announced three public inquiries into collusion by members of the Security Forces in the murders of Robert Hamill, Rosemary Nelson and Billy Wright.
While the Finnucne family had been assured that an inquiry would take place after Ken Barrett’s trial (and, as it happens, conviction) for the murder last month, Northern Secretary Paul Murphy has since said that much of it will be held in private. That hardly fulfills anyone’s definition of public, least of all the Finucane family’s. Having been engaged in litigation with the British Government for much of the past 15 years in order to secure a sworn, public inquiry, they are understandably disappointed. Again.
“The bottom line is that I don’t really know what they’re planning,” explains Michael. “I understand that it may be judicial, but doubts were raised over inquiries like Hutton and Butler and they were judicial inquiries, but they were not considered independent. I think in the public mind, they were robbed of credibility because they didn’t fulfil certain basic criteria. That’s what I fear will happen with my dad’s inquiry.”
In addition, the Finucane family have suffered quite a few slings and arrows down the years. David Trimble, among others, has suggested (while conveniently shielded by House of Commons privilege) that both Pat Finucane and Rosemary Nelson had IRA connections, an allegation strenuously denied by the family, but vociferously championed by journalists such as The Independent’s Bruce Anderson.
Michael admits that such slurs can be very upsetting, but says that the investigations carried out by both Cory and Stevens proved these allegations were nothing more than “innuendo and supposition.”
“Both have concluded without any equivocation that there was nothing to suggest that Pat Finucane or Rosemary Nelson were members of any unlawful organisation, or that they did anything other than go about their professional business in a professional manner. So I think people like David Trimble are just stirring it. They’re small-minded and bitter.”
That Peter Cory has been able to refute Mr. Trimble’s rant would certainly suggest that the judge’s involvement in the case has been worthwhile. Yet many have been critical of, and disappointed by, the Canadian’s report. So did the latest report have any real value, coming after the seemingly neverending Stevens inquiry?
Michael believes Cory’s investigation was necessary in the light of new evidence, but is sceptical about its outcome – especially in that if has all the hallmarks of a stalling device on the part of the British Government. “The Cory report came after a detailed presentation to both governments in 1999, which was based on what appeared to be intelligence material about a unit called the Force Research Unit, whose name wasn’t common currency back then but would be quite well known now.”
Having viewed the new information the Irish government quickly decided it was “very serious stuff” and became convinced of the need for a new public inquiry. Though the British Government did not agree initially, the unresolved inquiry cases meant they took the decision to appoint Cory in 2001.
“Nothing really changed in terms of the central issue – Cory fleshed it out a bit, and obviously got access to information that we haven’t seen, but fundamentally the issue remains the same and time has been lost,” Michael says.
Michael believes the endless delays in the case have been part of a deliberate policy by the British government to prevent anything from happening. Already, two key witnesses have died. Former UDA quartermaster William Stobie, who admitted in 2001 to supplying the guns used in the Finucane murder, was shot by loyalist gunmen in January 2002. Brian Nelson, the UDA intelligence officer and undercover British Army agent implicated in many loyalist murders, including Finucane’s, died from lung cancer in April last year.
“Obviously, the more time elapses, the less grave the consequences will be for the State when the inquiry ultimately happens – and it’s a policy I think they’ve enjoyed a great deal of success with. Nelson and Stobie are now dead and gone, other people may also die in the meantime. Certainly, information has gone missing – there may be words being shredded even as we speak.”

Of course, perhaps the most crucial questions raised by the Finucane murder involve the upward trickle of information. Through the shadowy figure of Brian Nelson, the British Army and Special Branch perfected a chilling form of collusion. As a UDA intelligence officer, Nelson had access to ‘target files’, which he would then distribute to any loyalist gang who asked. According to BBC journalist John Ware, MI5 were aware of this relationship – and indeed of the threat to Pat Finucane’s life. Ultimately, this implies that such pre-planned and sanctioned murders were known in Downing Street. Does Michael have any opinions on the extent of Number 10’s involvement, I wonder?
“It’s not clear how direct the link is in this case, but I think it’s unquestionable that a link exists. Certainly with the government of the time, with Thatcher so personally interested in the North, I think there would have been an unusually direct approach to Northern Ireland affairs. Independently of all that, we can point to the definite links to the RUC and RUC Special Branch – and to definite links between my father’s killing and the army’s Force Research Unit.”
The RUC Special Branch, FRU, MI5, army intelligence and the Metropolitan Police’s ‘counter-terrorist’ unit would also have met on a regular basis, and fed information to the government.
“There’s a direct link between the killing and a (then) Home Office junior minister, Douglas Hogg, who made a statement in Parliament three weeks before the murder,” says Michael. I think the suspicion has existed for a long time that the link to higher government levels was a direct one – the Stevens report suggests, and the Cory report confirms, that that suspicion is pretty well founded. Cory said after he finished his report that he considered papers that were marked ‘for the attention of Cabinet’, in the context of the Pat Finucane case. That clearly establishes a link. How strong the link was will be a matter for an inquiry to establish definitively.
“As long as the suspicion persists that there was a direct link between Cabinet on high and the killings on the ground, the perception that effectively government was pushing buttons and people were dying on the streets will be damaging, and will persist until there’s a full, clear and transparent investigation of all the issues, and it’s proved, disproved or debunked in a manner that people can see and assess for themselves.”
How does he respond to those who argue that, since a ‘normal’ sectarian killing is effectively no different to a state-sanctioned sectarian killing, the best course of action now is to ‘let it go’ and ‘not rake over old ground’? This is, after all, a very prevalent attitude since the Peace Process began.
‘The first thing is that I’m not ‘raking anything up’, and I’ve been saying this consistently since the day my father was murdered – we just want the truth and have a right to it,” says Michael.
“It’s been said to me and my mother in particular, by people who’ve lost relatives and are very interested in what we’re doing, that they don’t want a public inquiry into their own relatives’ death, or they simply feel they wouldn’t be up to pushing it for as long as we’ve needed to push it – but they’re very supportive and very keen to see a full exposition in this case. So people who are negative about it – I appreciate their point of view, or I appreciate that they have one, but it’s my experience that far more people have come up to us and said ‘keep going’. Most of the people who’ve said otherwise have a vested interest in not going into it.”
“If you take the South African model, there are significant differences, both in terms of the political landscape and even in something as simple as geography,” he argues. “People in South Africa were able to travel hundreds of miles to Truth & Reconciliation hearings, and maybe face an abuser for the first time, and then go back home with no realistic worries about running into those people again. Northern Ireland doesn’t offer any such distance. It’s still too small a place to have an exercise like that. The physical distance also lends itself to an emotional distance, and eventually you get a healing process. That would be very difficult here. Chris Patten spoke of a meeting he’d attended where all of the local inhabitants came, and one woman said, ‘Mr. Patten, it’s all very well for you to talk about reforming the RUC, but my husband was shot by a guy who’s now sitting two rows from me’. They both lived in the same town – and how you can go into a public process where people start talking about that, when they’ve got to pass each other on the High Street the next day, I don’t know. I’m not convinced that it’s healthy. If, ultimately, it’s decided that that’s the kind of process we need, then we should have it, but I think we need to take a step back first and decide what it is we want, and how we want to go about it”.
Given the farcical nature of the earlier trial involving William Stobie, did Ken Barrett’s recent conviction for his father’s murder give Michael Finucane any satisfaction?
“Not really – he was just small potatoes, you know? He’s no different from any other Loyalist triggerman. They were a dime a dozen in Northern Ireland for many years. The reality is – as Barrett has ironically confirmed himself in taped interviews – he couldn’t have done what he did without the help of the State. If you take Barrett out of the equation, any Tom, Dick or Harry could have been plugged straight back into his place to do the job he did. If you take the State out of the equation, Pat Finucane would probably still be alive, and maybe lots of other people. So to focus on Barrett is missing – or to be more accurate, deliberately ignoring – the big picture. And I think that’s what the government would quite like us to do. They’re happy to have a conviction so it can be pointed to as proof that they’ve been doing something. Sorry, but he was my father, and I’m not buying it.
How does Michael feel about the notion of a Peace, Truth and Reconciliation Tribunal in the North?
“The problem with the Pat Finucane inquiry from the British government’s point of view is that it goes very deeply and directly to the heart of something that they would rather not discuss. I think the after-effects of the Stevens report have yet to be quantified. Because to put it bluntly, Stevens is one of their own. He’s the commissioner of the London Metropolitan police, appointed to give the RUC a clean bill of health, and he’s standing there in front of the world saying, ‘Collusion happened. It’s a fact’. That is something that will take the British establishment a very long time to live down…they’re condemned by their own investigator. What more is there to say”?

Photography By Liam Sweeney